Ethereum developer: If miners unite to oppose EIP 1559, the network will accelerate the transition to PoS consensus mechanism

Ethereum developers appear to be accelerating the network’s transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus and moving away from the proof-of-work (PoW) mining community.

On March 11, developer “Mikhail Kalinin” published the specifications for the merger of the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain with the existing Ethereum network.

The release of the specification comes at a time of heightened tensions between Ethereum miners, who are said to stand to lose a lot of revenue when the Ethereum network transitions to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, and developers, who are keen to improve Ethereum’s high transaction fees and congestion.

Last week, media reported that Ethereum core developers plan to implement Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-1559 in July, which will replace the existing Ethereum fee policy.

In theory, the proposal could end Ethereum’s skyrocketing fees, but it would also cause miners to lose some of their income, so some miners responded to the news by saying they would jointly reallocate hashrate to the Ethermine mining pool, which opposes EIP-1559, on April 1 for 51 hours.

However, Ethereum core developers seem to be ready to deal with miners’ protests. Last month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin mentioned that if miners threaten to launch a 51% attack, Ethereum will switch to the PoS consensus mechanism as soon as possible.

Additionally, developers have paired EIP-1559 with the difficulty bomb in July’s London upgrade to reduce the likelihood of a hard fork. As Always_Question noted in a Reddit post, “Preparing for a merge provides the community with a fallback if a miner cartel coalesces against EIP 1559.”

Earlier this week, Buterin revealed that Ethereum 2.0 developers have been prioritizing chain merging over implementing sharding.

Buterin also pointed out that Layer 2 scaling solutions will be launched in the coming months, and he also expects Optimism's rollup solution to achieve 100 times the capacity of Ethereum to expand Ethereum in the short to medium term until the implementation of sharding.

Original article: https://cointelegraph.com/news/eth2-transition-accelerates-amid-rumblings-of-a-miner-rebellion

By Samuel Haig